"There is no more money," intoned George Osborne, the Conservative shadow chancellor, to the ranks of the faithful at the Conservative Party conference on September 29th, castigating the government for profligacy during the good times. But Mr Osborne's fit of the dismals did not stop Theresa Villiers, the party's transport secretary, from promising on the same day that a Tory government would scrap proposals for a third runway at London's Heathrow airport and spend ￡5.6 billion to build a French-style high-speed rail line connecting London and Leeds via Birmingham and Manchester by 2027. She also foresees a spur linking Britain's only existing high-speed line (from the Channel Tunnel to London's St Pancras station) to Heathrow airport.
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